A year after introducing a native video player, Reddit says the player has surpassed 1B views per month, with it serving over 50% of all video views
Sahil Patel / Digiday :
Context & Ripple Effects
Reddit spent three years building toward this: it launched a video division for original content in 2015, then opened uploads to users in 2017 with 15-minute limits before shipping a native player a year ago. The milestone matters because until recently most video on Reddit was hosted elsewhere and embedded.
The claim lands mid-ramp rather than at a peak — two months later Reddit reported 1.4B monthly native video views, up 38% since the start of 2018 — and it sets up the monetization story that culminated in the company's first DAU and ad-revenue disclosures.
First-order effects
- Advertisers buying Reddit inventory can now run in-feed video against views Reddit hosts itself, instead of sponsoring content that plays on YouTube or another third-party player.
- Embedded links from outside hosts lose majority share of Reddit video consumption, shifting watch-time data and recommendation signals into Reddit's own systems.
Second-order effects
- Owning the player gives Reddit the format-level ad product it needs to grow revenue toward the $100M+ 2019 base it later disclosed alongside its first DAU figures, putting pressure on rivals for brand budgets.
- Communities and moderators gain native upload-and-playback tooling, reducing dependence on external video platforms for AMAs, clips, and discussion threads.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Reddit follows the same path Facebook took when its daily video views tripled in 2014-2015: pull video in-house, then build dedicated surfaces around it — which is where Reddit ended up years later with a dedicated video feed under CPO Pali Bhat.
- Video becomes a structural pillar of Reddit's pitch to advertisers rather than a side feature, tying future product decisions (feeds, moderation, search) to keeping viewers on-platform.
The trend: Social platforms are steadily replacing embedded third-party video with native players so they can own the view counts, the user data, and the ad inventory that flow from them.